Want to erase those sound-muddling columns? Researchers at Duke University hear you. Working with metamaterials - substances that are engineered to possess properties not found in nature-they developed a way to keep sound flowing through inanimate objects. The team reported earlier this year that it was able to "hide" a small sphere from sound waves by rerouting them over the object by concealing it within a pyramid-shaped stack of perforated plastic plates. The result? The sphere (and plates) behaved like a flat, horizontal surface. "It's interesting and a little bit surprising that one relatively simple structure can hide any object as long as it fits [under the plastic] in the space provided," says Steven Cummer, one of the research's three authors and a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke.
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